The Clock Without Hands

The siren doesn’t wail.

It hangs.

A single second of sound, frayed at the edges, suspended in the air like a needle caught mid-scratch on a vinyl. I stand beneath the flickering marquee of the Loews State, its pink neon stuttering but never dying, its letters—S – T – A – T – E—burning with the same dull insistence they had ten minutes ago, or maybe ten years ago. The air is thick. Still. It doesn’t move. Even the flies—two of them circling over a discarded hot dog wrapper on the sidewalk—beat their wings in the same spot, again and again, as if wound on invisible loops. I count the beats. One. One. One. Then nothing. Then one again.

Time isn’t moving.

It’s just… staying.

I blink. My throat tightens around unshed words. I came here—this moment—to escape the clinic. To write myself into a city that loved me. To be the architect of something fragile and beautiful. I wrote the rain away last week. I scribbled a love letter on the back of a diner receipt and Mira appeared, her laugh like jazz on a cracked record. I made the subways run on starlight. I turned the sirens into song.

But this—this is wrong.

The siren isn’t song. It’s not poetry. It’s a frozen scream, a syllable caught in the teeth of time. I look down. My hands tremble. I flex my fingers. They move. I take a step forward. My foot lifts, falls. So I move. But nothing else does.

The man frozen mid-stride near the phone booth—he hasn’t shifted in what feels like hours. A woman in a yellow dress stares into a pocket mirror, her lipstick half-applied, her eye unblinking. A pigeon on the awning above the newsstand is caught mid-hop, one foot suspended, feathers flared, never touching down. Even the smoke from a distant alley breathes in one steady plume, uncurling into the same gray coil over and over, like a film reel stuck on a single frame.

I walk—slow, deliberate—toward the newsstand. The headlines scream up at me. Same ones as yesterday. *Blackout Lingers in Bronx*, *City on Verge of Bankruptcy*, *Son of Sam Claims Another Victim*. I reach down. Pick one up. The *Daily News*. Same paper. Same creases. I flip it open. Page three. A photo of a burned-out lot in Brownsville. I saw it yesterday. I read it yesterday. I didn’t. I couldn’t have. Yesterday didn’t happen.

There was no yesterday.

There is only this.

The same hour. The same breath. The same siren.

I drop the paper. It lands with a soft slap I don’t hear, because the sound never finishes falling. It just *is*. A dot, not a line.

I press my palms to my ears. But the siren isn't in my head. It's *out there*. Solid. Permanent. A monument to stillness.

And then—

—a memory. Not mine. Or maybe it is. A white room. Four walls. A window with bars, not glass. A man in a gray coat writing in a notebook. His pen moves. Mine moves. Are we writing the same thing?

No. I shut it out. I *rewrite* it.

I cross the street—slow, careful—to the edge of the subway grate. The warm breath of the tunnel rises, but it doesn’t pulse. It exhales once. And again. And again. Like a dying lung caught mid-collapse. I kneel. Press my fingers to the iron. It hums. A single note. Not shifting. Not fading.

I think of Mira. Where is she now? In her bookstore? Are the books still blank? Or have they returned, their spines gilded with poems I haven’t written?

I try to write now.

I reach into my coat pocket. Pull out a scrap of paper. A pencil nub. I press the lead to the page.

*The city breathes—*

But the sentence doesn’t finish. The lead breaks.

I snap it again. Try.

*—in rhythm with the subway’s—*

The word *subway* blurs. It flickers. For a second, it becomes *cell door*. Then back.

No.

I tear the paper. Crumble it. Throw it into the grate. It floats down, down—suspended. Never lands.

A tear slips free. It trails down my cheek. I watch it. It doesn’t fall. It sticks. A salt drop clinging to my skin, refusing gravity.

How long has it been?

Not minutes. Not hours.

I have no measure.

The sun—low over the west side, just above the Chrysler Building’s crown—is nailed in place. No deeper orange. No dusk. No night. Just this eternal, sweating twilight, the sky bruised purple at the edges, the glow of billboards smearing into the haze like wet paint.

I used to love this city at twilight.

I wrote a poem once, called *The Lavender Hour*. Mira and I danced on a rooftop. The streets below pulsed like veins. The world was soft then. Bendable.

Now it’s stiff.

Now it’s *stuck*.

And I—I am still.

Not frozen. Not like them.

I’m the only one who moves. The only one who feels the ache in her knees from kneeling too long. The only one whose breath comes too fast, too shallow, like I’m drowning in air that won’t refresh.

I look back at the siren.

It’s still wailing.

A single second on endless repeat.

I begin to count.

One.

Two.

Three.

But the numbers don’t help. They just echo. One. One. One.

I close my eyes.

Inside my skull, the poem tries to write itself. It always does. Even now. Even here.

*The siren sings of something lost—*

But what?

*—a voice without a body, a wound that won’t bleed—*

And then, softer:

*—a woman in a white room, writing the same line over and over—*

I stop.

Open my eyes.

The city is still.

The siren still wails.

And I—

—I am still.

Not a poet.

Not a god.

Not even a woman on a street corner.

Just another loop.

Another echo.

Another line that never ends.

The pencil nub lies broken on the sidewalk, its lead dust smeared across the concrete like charcoal from a burnt offering. I don’t pick it up. I don’t need it. The words are already here—crowding behind my ribs, pressing against the soft walls of my skull. They want out. They always want out. But what good are words if they don’t *do* anything? If they don’t *change* anything?

I stare at the newsstand.

Same papers. Same headlines. Same screaming typeface, same cracked plastic sleeves fogged with humidity that never evaporates. I know every smudge on the glass. I’ve read *The Times* three times today. Or yesterday. Or however many times I’ve cycled through this shuddering second. I stop pretending it’s different.

I reach for the *Village Voice*. The cover is blurred, the ink running slightly, like it’s been left out in rain that never came. The headline: *Poetry as Protest*. I laugh. The sound catches in my throat, dry and sharp. Protest against *what*? A world that doesn’t move? A clock without hands? A city trapped in the last gasp of a breath?

I flip the page.

Blank.

All of it blank.

No articles. No ads. No poetry. Just white. Perfect, endless white. I flip another page. Blank. Another. Blank. Like someone sucked the ink from the world.

Like *I* did.

My fingers tremble. I press them flat against the paper, as if I can *will* the words back. As if my pulse can recharge the press, restart the flow. I close my eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. My chest aches. I try to write it *for* them.

*The poet walks through a city of ghosts,* I think. *She writes their names in the air, but the wind won’t carry them.*

I open my eyes.

Nothing changes.

I turn to the next paper. *The Post*. Same thing. The cover promises a story: *Son of Sam Speaks to God!* But the inside—blank. The photograph of the cracked sidewalk outside the 70th Precinct—blank. Even the comic strip—empty boxes.

I sink down onto the curb. My knees protest. They feel old. Older than twenty-nine. Older than *time*, maybe. I press my palms into my eyes. The dark behind my eyelids pulses with shapes—letters forming, dissolving. *S-O-N-O-F-S-A-M*—no, wait—*S-A-R-A-H-G-R-E-E-N*—scrambling, shifting.

I used to believe the words built the world.

I wrote a sky without sirens. I wrote a lover who smelled like clove and vellum. I wrote a city that bent when I whispered.

But now?

Now I think the words are just *traces*. Like footprints in sand that the tide forgot to take. The world isn’t built from my poems.

It’s *haunted* by them.

A fly lands on my wrist. Stays.

Wings up. Wings down. Wings up. Again. And again. Not moving forward. Not fleeing. Just flickering in place, a tiny machine wound tight and left to whir.

I watch it.

I count its wingbeats.

One. One. One.

I stop.

What if I’m not the only one who remembers?

What if the fly remembers? What if the newsstand remembers? What if the woman with the half-applied lipstick—what if she’s been screaming inside her frozen face this whole time? Trapped in the instant before the lipstick tube slipped, before the wind shifted, before *time* stopped?

Did she know?

Did any of them?

Or are they just… props? Lines I wrote and then forgot to finish?

I think of Mira.

Not the one who laughs in bookshops. Not the one who curls against me in the crook of a fire escape, whispering lines of Rilke between kisses. I think of the *other* Mira. The one last week—her eyes wide, fingers pressing into my arm. *Sarah,* she said. *The books are blank. Why are the books blank? Can’t you see? I don’t exist.*

I couldn’t answer.

I just wrote *I love you* on the inside of her wrist with a blue ballpoint. Watched the ink bloom into her skin. Watched it *hold*. For a moment, it was enough.

But the books stayed blank.

And now—

Now the *Village Voice* is blank.

And the *Daily News* is blank.

And the city is a sentence without verbs.

I stand. My legs shaky. I walk back to the newsstand. Pick up the *Voice* again. Stare at the blank page.

I try to write the article myself.

I press my fingertip to the paper. Trace letters in the dust.

*The woman on the corner knows the truth: immortality isn’t endless life. It’s endless* same.

I stop.

Because that’s not poetry.

That’s a diagnosis.

And I’ve heard that voice before.

Not in the streets. Not in poems.

In a room.

White walls.

A chair.

A man in a gray coat, pen poised.

Dr. Voss.

I hear his voice like a record beneath the record—the low rasp of clinical certainty. *"Circumstantial evidence suggests the patient experiences time non-linearly. Episodes of dissociative amnesia coupled with delusional self-identification as a reality-shaping agent. The fixation on repetition—on recurring phrases, images, events—suggests an internal loop, a cognitive imprisonment..."*

I squeeze the paper in my fist.

No.

No no no.

He’s not here.

He can’t be here.

This is *my* world.

I made this siren.

I made this street.

I made this *breath*.

But—

But what if I didn’t make it?

What if I just… *found* it?

Like a poem half-written, left on a bench?

What if this isn’t a city I built?

What if it’s a *cell* I decorated?

The thought slithers in—cold, wet, inevitable.

I look up.

The marquee still flickers: S – T – A – T – E.

But now I see it.

Not *State*.

S – T – A – T – E.

Letters spaced too far apart.

Like they’re holding something back.

Like they’re spelling *waiting*.

I step closer.

The neon buzzes. Same pitch. Same rhythm. A hum that never resolves.

I press my palm to the glass of the newsstand.

It’s warm.

Too warm.

Like skin.

Like fever.

And beneath my fingers—just for a second—I feel it.

A pulse.

Not the city.

Not the light.

*The glass.*

It thrums once.

Then again.

Then again.

Steady.

Steady.

Steady.

Like a heart.

Like *my* heart.

I jerk my hand back.

The siren still wails.

The fly still hovers.

The woman’s lipstick remains half-drawn.

And I—

I know.

This isn’t immortality.

This is *stillness*.

And stillness isn’t peace.

It’s prison.

I made this moment because I was afraid to move forward.

Afraid of losing Mira.

Afraid of the truth.

Afraid of the white room.

So I wrote a world that wouldn’t change.

But a world that doesn’t change…

Isn’t a world.

It’s a wound that never heals.

A breath that never finishes.

A poem with only one line.

I look down at my hands.

Clean.

No ink.

No blood.

No proof I ever wrote a single thing.

And I wonder—

If I stopped writing right now…

Would the world end?

Or would it finally *begin*?